When you boot from live CD, or doing the first boot after installing Ubuntu, splash screen looks awesome. But as soon as you enable nvidia-current driver, installed with apt-get, splash screen goes all crazy.

With crazy I mean that resolution is very low, font(I assume) is very weird and it all looks like it's been broken.

The above solution might not work for you. In my case e.g. hwinfo doesn't show the supported resolutions. You can, however, get this information directly from grub.

Press c to get in the grub console and then enter insmod video_all followed by videoinfo to get the supported resolutions. If your native resolution is supported, use it. Also use it directly as shown (i.e. 1680x1050x32, so include the colordepth). Get back by pressing ESC.

When you have the supported resolution edit /etc/default/grub and the file to include these two lines:

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'
GRUB_GFXMODE=1680x1050x32
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep

Now run the following lines to make the splash show earlier and to actually commit the changes to grub.

No, hwinfo did not give the correct resolution, but I used the nearest - which works OK. I also tried pressing C while booting (tried Shift and Escape too) but couldn't get into Grub console.
–
neziricOct 11 '10 at 20:00

1

If you don't get the regular grub-screen (where you can select which kernel or OS to boot) you have to hold SHIFT while booting. When you get the grub screen, you press C to enter the console.
–
mniessOct 12 '10 at 22:44

Worked like a charm for me! In my case the command in grub console was 'videoinfo' and not 'vbeinfo' .
–
BrozzSamaMar 31 '14 at 16:37

I think the problem is, that Nvidia GPUs need proprietary drivers that can't be built into the kernel, so they are loaded at a very late boot stage. So if I remember correctly, this script makes your computer load a generic vesa driver to show the splash screen. This actually makes your computer take longer to start (but I don't know if we're talking about seconds or milliseconds).

I personally wouldn't bother changing core parts of my system for an eyecandy, but as long as it works, it shure is nice.

After the installation run the following command and note down the highest resolution:

sudo hwinfo --framebuffer

For me this was Mode 0x0361: 1280x800 (+5120), 24 bits, next edit the following file:

gksu gedit /etc/default/grub

This will open the GRUB config file, we now look for GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" and change it with the following, change your resolution with mine and also add the color depth (for me 24 could be 16 or 32).